Business start-ups don’t always start with a product. It’s not common, but the entrepreneurial spirit can strike without having something specific to sell. And there are other reasons: many would-be entrepreneurs discover that their ideas just won’t work, but don’t want to give up the dream. Established companies need to generate new products to stay ahead of the competition. And some natural-born entrepreneurs are driven by the creation process, never mind the product or market or industry.
But where does the entrepreneur find a new product, either to start up a new company or add to an existing product line? Until recently, that was a laborious, hit-or-miss process. Now, the products can find you, thanks to a revolutionary approach called “open Innovation.”
According to the Wikipedia definition, open innovation is a reaction to the fact that “…in a world of widely distributed knowledge, companies cannot afford to rely entirely on their own research, but should instead buy or license processes or inventions (e.g. patents) from other companies. In addition, internal inventions not being used in a firm's business should be taken outside the company (e.g., through licensing, joint ventures, spin-offs).”
Over the past decade or so, the country’s leading corporate innovators - IBM, Proctor & Gamble, DuPont, Boeing and many others - have executed a U-turn on the typical way of managing intellectual property. While they once locked away products and ideas they could not exploit, they now offer them to anyone interested in going to market.
They even created an open innovation marketplace called yet2.com to post the intellectual property for everyone to see. Describing itself as “the world’s largest technology transfer marketplace,” yet2.com has more than 100,000 registered users, many thousands of technologies on offer and even a section for companies to post their innovation needs to all comers.
The technologies are organized by industry (finance, automotive, consumer products), science (biology, chemistry, physics), or application (instrumentation, materials, manufacturing). The individual technology offerings usually read something like this: "Microscopically reinforced polymers (thermoplastics, elastomers), without fibers or fillers. This micro-reinforcement technology enables new applications where existing thermoplastics, elastomers, thermosets, and reinforcing technologies have not had sufficient toughness or fracture strength, particularly at elevated temperatures, or the ability to endure flexure for perhaps millions of cycles without severe particulation.
Not for me, but an opportunity for some start-up organization with the appropriate technical savvy.
And “open” does not end there…most companies don’t care how their innovation is turned into a profitable product. In one case, a pair of serial entrepreneurs from Ohio licensed a fiber product used to stuff pillows and turned it into a market-changing growth medium for hydroponic gardening.
The bottom line…your business does not have to start with something you created. You can find plenty of opportunities to adopt and adapt existing technologies – many under patent protection – to new markets. All you have to know is where to look. Consider starting at www.yet2.com.
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